we have made it to episode number twenty of card ladder confidential i feel like we should be throwing a party or some sort of celebration this is a feat we are here a lot of you remark on whenever a card letter confidential shows up in your feed so we're here to deliver that post holiday i have to think about these things because we're recording it in advance so you'll get a little treat after your day off of work and we have a whole menu of topics to dig into and we start these things with the cold open question and guys this one wasn't that hard although i was unprepared this morning but just there was a big auction last night and so whenever there's a big auction there's a lot of narratives there's a lot of everything and i wanted to ask you both and i'll ask each of you individually to select one card that ended in the auction and whether it's you have good things to say about it bad things interesting things i just wanna start this conversation off with a card that ended in the premier and something that is on your mind and i'll defer like does does does based on that does do either one of you have like feeling of just saying i know what the card is i'm ready to go does anyone wanna step up to the plate i've got one and but but brent do you have one it it's it's it's interesting you asked the question because i just recorded saturday slabs on one card specific and it was okay okay probably the most obvious one and it was the josh allen shield mhmm and so yes that is the card and you know i'll just i don't wanna take all the thunder from the cold open question but i think you've got a lot of conversations about this being a million dollar football card you've got a lot of people sharing this card and i'm all for excitement i'm all for exuberance but i am left with the question what does this mean for me like i'm i'm just not sure what this means for me as a football card collector and a cohost of the football card podcast i think primarily my takeaway on this card is that which i have not heard anyone talk about is the fact that this card was just manufactured from product people or executive people in an office at fanatics before they got the license and it's a brand new concept a brand new card although it has all the elements we want in football cards this is a brand new thing and it basically is confirming the decision of the manufacturer to create a card like this and see what the market does and the market responded so hats off to the people at fanatics and topps this is a home run people are talking about it but i'm just it it for so long cards and values has been built off of legacy and conversation about players and collectors debating on which cards should matter and why they should matter and over time this elevates the price and that's not the case with this million dollar sale this is a brand new card and it is the first time it has appeared at the auction out of the tops chrome product that just was released and now it sells sells for one point three million so those are the questions i'm i'm like wrestling around with what does this card mean for me and then also i just can't help but think about the fact that this feels a little manufactured so that's what i have to say yeah it's great it's a super interesting take there's a lot of meat on that bone i think zooming out to the fanatics premiere as a whole it looks like there were six hundred and five sports card results that trickled in to cardladder sales history from that one auction and certainly it's headline worthy that two of the cards went for comfortably over a million bucks but if you simply look at this auction and remove the brand new releases if you just sort of like ignore the post license transfer fanatics slash tops manufactured nfl nba cards the and and even like there was a pretty high selling aaron judge twenty twenty five card so like just to give like a taste of it to make it a little more concrete you had the josh allen from twenty twenty five tops chrome which you mentioned the gold nfl shield autograph redemption one point three five million tops chrome super factor lebron from twenty twenty five autograph one of one one point two six million then twenty twenty five tops chrome legend super factor tom brady autograph one of one three hundred and twenty four thousand twenty twenty five top transcendent collection aaron judge mlb logo man patch autograph one of one psa ten ten two hundred and fifty two thousand like among the top twelve sales the two highest and four of the twelve were twenty twenty five releases if you take those out of the population this looks like a more normal premier granted with more volume like i was looking at some research i had done about premier volumes in twenty twenty four and they were sometimes a little bit more than one hundred cards in the premier sometimes a little bit less six hundred and five last night that's crazy but that's one big picture takeaway so before i say my card which i think is a great foil to your josh allen card before i say that let me yield the floor to if there if there's any commentary on sort of you know what the impact is of these big expensive twenty twenty five new releases on the outcome and the headlines of this auction i'm gonna take your yielding and then propose a question to josh and i just want josh's opinion as a longtime lebron apologist and collector josh what do you think about this twenty twenty five tops chrome superfractor lebron auto sale for one point two six million well this is gonna be what i brought up anyways so you're you're teeing me up even better i so my overall thought on the modern stuff is it's it's obviously like out of control you know people are paying exuberant amounts just to get back into this twenty twenty five especially tops chrome fanatics getting the licenses everyone's like way overly excited i but i actually think this lebron is like pretty pretty sick and then my zag is i don't a million is a lot or whatever but like a bunch of cards sell for a million and this is his first top chrome super factor since two thousand nine this is not the variation granted i would want the one without the autograph but i know collectors put a lot of emphasis on the on card like topscrome autograph version of these superfactors this just this just wasn't a thing from the two thousands tops chrome but now like with baseball is they a lot of people prefer the autograph and he's like debuting his new crown autograph which i get people don't like it but i think it's pretty pretty sweet honestly and it's just like a sick card it's like his first top scrum supervisor since two thousand nine and he's still playing there's a stupid brady superfractor auto which is like four years past his retirement this is playing days and it's towards the end of his career michael jordan's pmg green is in the last full playing season for him with the bulls so there is a precedence for these super rare you know kind of one of one of one type cards that are in the later of the guy these guys' career and i i don't think it's that bad i think that's a maybe not exactly what i was expecting josh from you but i think as you talked it all makes sense and i i'll just remark on this and then chris i wanna hear your card is the fact that for me none of these cards whether it's nfl nba wwe whatever the category of tops that they produced i think they've done a really nice job on these sets and these cards and i have a lot of nice things to say about it i find it just interesting the prices that a lot of these cards are going going for so that's just when i look at these i'm like wow that's a lot but then i guess if you're comparing this lebron playing day super fracture with other lebron super fractures then maybe it's not as crazy but chris what what what is what card do you wanna talk about yeah so i mostly found the premier to be a bit of a snooze fest personally why i didn't like most of the cards in there not saying that they're bad cards or obviously not these are a lot of these cards were extremely expensive and hotly desired and so on but for my taste i'm allowed to have taste that's different than the mainstream or that's different than the collector next to me and for my taste i didn't like most of the cards not for my collection however there were four cards that were at least of interest that maybe were bid worthy if they stayed at a price that i liked and none of them did but and and among those four cards is the one sale that i've that i wanna highlight so but the four that i highlighted were the o four flir showcase masterpiece one of one shaquille o'neal which was a psa seven it sold for twenty seven thousand three hundred another one was the ninety seven flir showcase legacy row one cal ripken one of one psa nine that's sold for ten thousand six hundred and fifty the third was a two thousand five exquisite base set rainbow one of one kevin garnett psa eight that's sold for ninety six hundred bucks so we're talking about like the low end of a premiere and the fourth one and the one that i want to position as the foil to the josh allen is the nineteen ninety seven flair showcase legacy collection row zero masterpiece john elway one of one psa authentic which sold for twenty four thousand six hundred bucks that john elway row zero masterpiece is one of his first one of ones i don't know the release schedule for nineteen ninety seven nfl products and as a technicality there are nineteen ninety six college uniform one of ones that are these like phone cards that are in fact i believe have written on them one of ones so i i believe technically the first football one of ones are those but i don't believe john elway was in that set and i believe ninety seven is the first year of one of ones for john elway and he doesn't have many i i think it's maybe around a handful not many from ninety seven and you know the the flair obviously offers four one of ones for each player for each of the rows and john elway you know this is a this is a super bowl mvp this is a regular season mvp this is one of the great players and this is from the early earliest issues of one of ones in football not to mention it's a beautiful card and it went for twenty four thousand six hundred dollars and certainly not a rookie but as we established neither was the josh allen now i understand that there's like a lot of like real a lot of excitement about this idea that these the like for example these gold shield autograph cards are sort of taking the integration of player assets in particular game worn memorabilia and sports cards to a new level because it's these these are readily identifiable to a game they're visible to everybody who's sort of watching and notices the special patch and it's just sort of raising the bar from what we had previously had which is like well maybe you get language on the back that says game worn maybe you get language on the back that says player worn maybe you get language on the back that says not associated but typically although there are some exceptions to this but typically there there wasn't much placement to a specific game and so this card not only is placement to a specific usage of the of the relic but it's also commemorating an mvp season which is obviously very special player to the history of sport so there's a lot of belief in this as a category but there's also a lot of reason why a lot of institutional stakeholders would like to see huge sales come out of these products so that when the next release comes there's this notion that there's several million dollar lottery tickets embedded into each one of these boxes and that it can really drive a lot of excitement and enthusiasm to try and buy into breaks and open the and open the products so that's my card brett and josh is the the john elway row zero masterpiece one of one for twenty four thousand six hundred bucks a ton of money but paltry in comparison to the josh allen what a great card to select because when you shared it on the screen and i did not know that this was a part of the auction my first thought was i've covered this card before and i thought should i should i have covered a one of one masterpiece and as you were talking i looked up the sales history this card has sold four times in the last two years one of one masterpiece with all the accolades and all the prestige that you just highlighted and i think that to me is the you you you kinda take the air out of it when you look up at the sales history and see in twenty twenty four august it sold for nearly nineteen k then september of twenty four you sold it sold for thirteen k then in july of twenty five it sold for thirteen k and now we're back up in may of twenty two or twenty six for twenty four k so great card agree with everything you say but man i just wish these cards when they're awesome like this and they have all the elements would just stay rested in someone's collection for like a decade until i saw them again okay so to like fin to put a button on that over under on the next time we see this card at auction if i set that to one year are you taking the over or the under i hope it's the over but i'm going to say it's the under because we are we are at the all time we are at the all time high of this card right now at twenty four so whoever bought it for twenty four if they're not an elway broncos nineties or have some affiliation for this and they just bought it because there's an opportunity maybe they think in this market they'll get more but i hope that's not the case but that was good that was good we extended it and we've got a lot of stuff to talk about let's talk about windy alright so i don't know about you guys but after and i'll i'll set the stage here so we've got a tied series as we're recording this we've got game three tonight there will be have be game four will have happen and then by the time this gets released on tuesday we'll be gearing for game five so a lot just wanted to make that point clear but i wanna focus in on monday night's performance obviously the forty plus twenty plus game i mean i could it was just one of those games it was great and it was a moment where wimby did extraordinary things willed his way to win in okc which isn't easy and what happened on the other side of it the hobby responded i opened up instagram everyone with wimby cards was posting them everyone's excited which is which is good before we dive into some questions you i'm sure you both were watching the game i'm sure you thought of cards was there is there before we dig into this is there any like opening comments or remarks based on the performance wenbinyama's cards collectors sharing their thoughts about wendy's cards like any opening remarks that either one of you wanna make before we dive in well they're separate because he's obviously moved himself into top three best players in the nba he's top three in by all advanced metrics this last season he's only twenty two years old he's obviously like way ahead of any timeline people would put put put on someone at his age he's on a a great young team there's a lot of future hype for him obviously he's living up to it game one was incredible forty twenty you know he's like putting himself with like kareem and shaq and jokic with some of these numbers and playoff games and such and he's only twenty two i i i point that out again because most of these guys are like twenty four twenty five when they start hitting these this playoff excitement so he's obviously incredible now separating that from like his card value stuff i thought his i thought he had the most ridiculous sale in that whole fanatics premiere and it's the twenty twenty five tops chrome gold autograph out of fifty eight that card thing dude that card sold for two hundred thousand dollars it's a pop three already it's out of fifty for some perspective the highest sale of a gold refractor for lebron out of any year of top scrum that's not a rookie card is the two thousand eight and it's sold for ninety thousand so like this card is selling for double any lebron psa ten gold refractor ever i think that's absolutely insane and these prices are just not even close to being sustainable for victor no matter how well he's playing so there's just like a a ton of like let's blow past him winning five championships and just start paying those prices immediately and that's that's fine you know there's excitement mixed in with the new release of tops coming back we've talked about this a bunch but that card is an absurd sale and his his the amount of value he brought in the premiere is absurd thirty sales two hundred thousand two hundred thousand a hundred thousand eighty seven thousand so people are really excited about wimmin yabba and watching these games i understand but i you know the prices don't really line up i just can you imagine being one of the other two owners of this card you must be just throwing a party right now dude for now that'll this will be a pop eleven in like a in a a couple of months no doubt so chris when i look at these numbers and i think about just the capturing the the hearts and minds of the hobby you know i think about just like the the otani side and then now there's wendy and doing these things and the question that i have is like at what moment does a player achieve all time collectability status you know it's fine and well when you've got a player that's just like a rising star that's doing these things probably way ahead of schedule who's undeniably like josh said you know one of the top three players in the nba but like i don't know if if right now like today if wendy never played again i could say that his cards are all time collectible maybe they are i don't know that's why i wanna propose the question like how do you think about all time collectibility and when a player like wendy might achieve it or not yeah definitely has not achieved it yet and i think even the most ardent advocate for victor wenbanyama's collectability would agree to that the resume right now reads a defensive player of the year award like josh pointed out he finished third in mvp this year so that's he finished right ahead of luka which is amazing finished right behind jokic and behind sheikh ildis alexander so he's won two playoff series had a really iconic game with that crazy thirty foot three that was like i screamed when that shot went in it was very exciting but certainly the the resume needs to be multiplied by an order of magnitude before and i've i don't mean that figuratively he needs to ten x just like the hobby well the hobby's gonna ten x wemby's resume needs to ten x for it to make sense that he would be collectible for the long term and so like you you know you start thinking like how does a player become collectible for the long term in the first place it's a really great question and i think one of the pathways to i think there's two clear pathways i think there's a an accomplishments pathway and a cultural pathway the accomplishments pathway is you know like for let's take lebron as a very recent example anytime any player is getting to the end of a great career on all of their broadcasts it's gonna get thrown up on the screen such and such just got to twenty eight thousand points and here are the all time leaders in points scored and lebron's name will ring throughout broadcasting of the nba for decades and decades and decades and so anytime the topic comes up of like career totals and points as one example the name of lebron will ring out and that will cause people to think about lebron it will trigger twenty plus years of memories of watching him play and so that's sort of the scaffolding in one sense of how a player can remain present and in in front of mind it's like their accomplishments are so undeniable that they have to be constantly brought up as a measuring stick and there are definitely players in all sports who have that that's the accolade pathway so what can wimbanyama do to get on to that accolade pathway that's the that's the question and then or there's the cultural impact pathway which is that you were so memorable and so important for such a long period of time that you know people will remember that image they'll remember the moments they'll remember how you shaped the way the sport is thought of like steph curry is a guy who kind of has a foot in each of those lanes like the accolades are impressive four titles one finals mvp arguably could have been more two regular season mvps so there's this very nice accolades path all time leader in three pointers made and continuing to add to it but there's also the cultural path like just you know like josh was telling me a story one time like he was playing basketball on a on a court against some guys and like they just tried to play like curry they just wanted to do nothing but just launch threes all game long you know like that's so so like you can't even escape the thought of curry if you're just playing basketball against people and like you're just like oh gosh this is the impact of steph curry so there's a cultural path too and and maybe there's other paths too but like those are two clear paths and right now there's an enormous amount of work to be done for victor waminiyama before either of those paths are viable to him having a sufficient legacy build to reach the apex of collectability and then the one other thing i'll add because i love that you brought up ohtani chouhy ohtani is the favorite right now a big betting favorite to win his fifth mvp granted this is baseball they give out two of them a year it's certainly a watered down award relative to the nfl and the nba and in fairness to that side ohtani has led the mlb in war only twice but nonetheless if we step outside of the inter sport comparison and go intrasport the only player to win more mvps than him even if he doesn't get a fifth is barry bonds who sits at seven and ohtani right now sits at four and is a favorite to get to five and that just puts even a bigger gap between himself and trout and pooholes and judge and all these other guys who are three so ohtani is in full legacy build ohtani is like yes the accolade path is there and yes the cultural moment path is there too now still he has a ways to go before reaching the legacy build of some of the apex players in sports in my opinion but he's well on his way i think that's a good comparison point to wenbanyama because i do think there's a lot of like well if ohtani can do this then wenbanyama can do this maybe but ohtani is a lot of the way there his his power bar is filling up and wemby's has just started a lot of great thoughts there and i wanna kick it over to josh but i wanna do so in a manner where we chris talked about accolades and cultural impact that kinda trickles down into collectability i think one thing that i don't think i've ever really talked about on stacking sides a lot but thinking about players and i think a element that straddles both like cultural impact and potential accolades is competitiveness like something that we gravitate to with these guys on cards is we wanna collect guys that we believe are competitors that are not worried about what they're doing after the game but just care about winning you collect lebron james lebron james is a competitor he has won all he cares about is winning chris you collect michael jordan ultimate competitor michael jordan just cares about winning game one i did not know that wendy had that level of competitiveness in him i was i'm not watching him every night i'm not reading about him every night i'm a basketball fan who's watching wendy when he shows up on my tv and i was just like damn this guy is a killer he's a competitor and he's wearing it on his sleeve so josh maybe like as you think about just like competitiveness and collecting and the importance of it and maybe what wimby has shown or hasn't shown like how do you think that impacts like his overall market just like now and maybe in the long term yeah first of all that that psa ten autograph's a pop five cardladder now tracks the psa dna autograph population separate from the non dna and the dna has two psa tens and the regular has three so it's five i wanted to clean that up the competitive thing i'd say that probably sides more on like the cultural side of it what like what chris was saying like guys get the reputation of being quote unquote killers and it's always been like oh are you like a kobe jordan killer or are you a lebron like the opposite or whatever you know you always hear that narrative i would say the best player of the last ten years is jokic and he's never once been called like a killer or competitive so i don't really i don't know that that really translates too much and like the killer we i think of is like westbrook and he kinda has this like you know he does too much and like turns the ball over so it can kinda go both ways it's probably more of a cultural thing you know it's like kobe has this mamba thing or whatever and and it's it kind of appears that wimminyama has some of that as well which is great culturally i don't know that it's necessarily gonna help him translate into winning we'll we'll see but yeah it's like a fun it's like i would say like it's more fun for him because he's so big we're just not used to like we're kinda used to seeing it more from like the smaller guys like they kinda have this like small guy thing going on where they have to like alpha everybody and try to match up whereas seeing it from literally the tallest guy in the court by like a foot seeing him sort of run around and screaming at everybody is is an exciting thing and it's like you see him pull up for three in the exact same spot that curry did like chris pointed out and the same court on the okc and he's literally like two feet taller than steph curry so i think it's more of seeing someone this much of an outlier in size doing some things that we harken back to like smaller more normal sized humans is is the part that gives him this cultural boost you know that's good this has been a good discussion on victor wimbanyama before we move on to the next topic a lot will have changed before this goes live but i gotta get your predictions on the western conference finals like based on everything you've seen so far granted to the audience we have watched two games the third game is tonight as we're recording this what do you think is going to be the result chris do you wanna go first yeah i think that this the nba script writers accidentally leaked the script when they showed us what happened in the midseason tournament the emirates cup because in that tournament the knicks advanced out of their bracket to the finals and on the other side of the bracket it was literally okc versus san antonio and san antonio advanced out of their bracket and then you had a knicks san antonio showdown and then the knicks beat them and not only would that outcome mirror the cup but it also sort of mirrors how those matchups played out during the regular season as well the knicks have a beatdown or two of the spurs on their ledger already from the regular season so that would be my predictions we're gonna get spurs knicks and the knicks are gonna win oh boy josh what do you think so this is not what i'm rooting for but i think the injuries are tough for the spurs like no fox now harper's banged up waiman yama always seems to get banged up in these long drawn out series so i'm worried about him and the thunder just have like so much more depth they're playing like eleven guys the other day so even and like they play better when jalen williams doesn't play nobody wants to talk about this they're like oh jalen williams is out of sam street they're literally better without him their record is way better without him their win percentage without him in the last two years is like eighty five percent and with him it's like seventy five so i think okc will actually get better without jalen williams and then they you know like i said they play ten deep the spurs are kind of very dependent on their top three to four guys and if two of them are out they might be in trouble i don't want that to happen i am sick of okc just as much as the next guy so i i'm rooting for the spurs and then obviously the knicks are gonna blow through the cavs it seems and i'm not sure about the finals i'm i will be rooting for the knicks over okc we'll see i'm not sure i'm i'm hesitant to root i'm hesitant to think that kat and brunson can win an nba championship we'll see i guess i should throw my hat in the ring while we're at it i think this year as a pacers fan i'm stuck with the most miserable ending which will be the oklahoma city thunder versus the new york knicks and oh man it's just like against my religion to say the knicks are gonna win the title so i think it's gonna be back to back for the thunder as much as that result doesn't excite me at all but i tend to lean on this element of the the bench and what they can throw at you and i value experience an awful lot at this moment in time in the playoffs and so i yeah it it's the i won't won't take anything away from the knicks the knicks have had in just a remarkable run they've just been lights out so and the garden's rocking so but yeah thunder knicks thunder winning that's hey brett if the knicks win you get a great trump card because you've bounced them in two straight seasons so yeah but we don't have the title here in indiana so that's that's that sucks but yeah that's neither here nor there good discussion i wanna talk about how long can high end pricing sustain without broad participation it seems like anytime the market is going up there is a cast of characters and a lot of characters talking about just where the hobby's going and how they don't feel like they're necessarily connected to it so maybe we start with are we seeing strength from broad participation or is this concentrated conviction amongst a smaller but mightier or more wealthy group of participants all like throw something else on top of this it's i can't ignore the discussions on barry bonds and what's happening on my instagram feed everyone's analyzing the barry bonds market and although i don't collect baseball cards i'm very interested in just like the fact that all of a sudden a player like bonds who is historically significant and has the accolades to back it up prices are doubling and tripling overnight so the question is are we seeing strength from broad participation or concentrated conviction chris let's start with you yeah i think the data will be instructive here i saw one kobe collector pointing out that in last night's premiere he had a twenty ten nt colossal logo man autograph psa six autograph ten granted it's out of two it's not out of one it sold for six hundred and sixty thousand all in so that's an enormous sum but it's a or it's an early kobe logoman autograph one of one you know there were expectations that that card would go for over a million bucks or another card that i think underwhelmed a bit was the opg rookie gretzky psa nine auto ten which i believe is is is extremely low pop in that grade or higher so you know i i you know i look at some of this up i mean i as i sort of scroll the results you've got your obligatory handful of kaboom golds that go for the low six figures but that's been going on for a while you've got a pmg green and a pmg red they're in the low to mid six figures i mean that's that's sort of been the case you've got a few you know ntrpa psa tens of like shay and ants that sell for a hundred and change that's pretty normal you know you've got your you got some brady stuff heating up you know like his two thousand bowman chrome refractor nine five that sold for a hundred and seventy four the previous sale was like half of that so that's a that's a big jump but it's not it's not like soaring into like unprecedented prices it's not even an an all time high for the card and you know then you keep scrolling and you get to you know you get your ohtani you know bowman first chrome blue out of one fifty low low hundreds you get your handful of lebron and jordan exquisites you know low hundreds upper eighties and nineties you get your star one zero one jordan you know in a higher grade right around a hundred some of the other stuff they kinda like kinda left up is like john stockton had a logoman autograph one of one from twenty twenty one flawless go for a hundred and five thousand that was by far the highest price ever paid for one of his cards but you know as i kinda scroll the results it's like there's nothing too crazy here like there's definitely upward momentum across the board but you know if if once again if you sort of take out those those those handful of headliners from brand new products you get a pretty standard picture of a a pretty consistent trend and i think like i think i think the trend is overstated and i think there's there's reasons why you you look at the card letter industry volume tab and six hundred or i mean i'm sorry six hundred million in monthly sales for a few months in a row that that's obviously a a giant number you look at the grading reports and just like record numbers of cards being graded but if you kind of like zoom in a little bit you know you can really see how it's siloed like a lot of the grading is coming from tcg sports grading is is still trending up but but not by any sort of monstrous proportion and you know you look at auction results and you see that yeah we have these like kind of outlier new things like the first ever lebron topps chrome superfractor on card autograph or the debut of the first you know with josh allen being a part of this this first you know gold shield autograph one of one card concept you know outside of sort of the outlier results like it's it's actually you know not it's not it's it's definitely trending up but it's not as exaggerated as it is it might kind of feel if you if you if you aren't parsing the results very good analysis there i maybe josh on the six hundred and five cards i thought i think chris you brought that up earlier i think that's telling like if you take those certain cards out the newer cards that were sold for an insane price and just looked at the rest you know you're you're kind of the perspective is it's kinda pretty normal business as usual maybe what's not business as usual is like the six hundred and five number especially if you compare it to other premier auctions over the last like you know two or three years maybe zeroing in on that number obviously putting up this volume of cards to end in one night suggests that there's a buying pool of people that is maybe more broad than the past like what do you think about that like the idea that we're gonna run this auction it's not gonna be a hundred or two hundred cards it's gonna be six hundred and five cards and you're gonna like it like what do you think that signals well it lines up with the industry tab where we're showing the overall volume still continuing to rise but we're not necessarily seeing individual cards you know five x ing like it was in twenty twenty one that's kind of the same theme that keeps carrying through and chris is pointing that out with some of these individual sales like some of the individual ones sure they pop off because they're one on ones that were created a year ago and they they sort of make these crazy prices but like if you drill into individual prices you know you're not seeing like two x in the last year you know consistently except for pokemon which continues to be the outlier it's like pokemon waimanayama and then these sort of like tops chrome outlier cards those are the three categories that are really carrying this narrative that like every that that the high end is just like exploding you know and then you know you got your random pmgs and the kabooms continue to do their thing so kinda what chris is saying it seems like it's more focused on a few things that make us feel like everything's going crazy but overall i would say it's way more of like a broad there's just a ton of money being spent in general there's a lot like the stock market's at an all time high crypto's still really high there's still a lot of money like paintings are selling for fifteen million chris will send me links of like these insane paintings that sell for twenty million so there's still five eighty five million for those red rectangles sir eighty five okay yeah i see so there's like just crazy money being spent on these speculative assets regardless i don't think that we're that we're just like blowing anything else out the water i think that's pretty standard what do you think of this dennis rodman green pmg sale for three hundred and forty eight k which i believe is the it's a pop one and a psa eight what are you doing brett what are you what are you doing here teaming up i'm i'm asking what your question i i'm i'm looking at the the feed in the green pmg it's just radiating and and it's telling me it's dennis rodman and it's a green pmg and it sold for three hundred and forty eight thousand dollars i want i want your guys' opinion on it like what do you got go ahead josh the the cultural king mister dress wearer dude this guy is the most overrated player in the history of the nba this card is insane i can't believe this card is over this much money if you know anything about me brett you just teed me up for the most ridiculous card ever i i i this guy averaged there we go he averaged like this guy averaged like nine points a game dude dream on green is better than this guy he sucks oh that chris do you have anything to add to this rodman green pmg well you know how much how much did that sell for three hundred and forty eight thousand three hundred and forty eight thousand you know that's that's a huge sum you know one of the interesting parts about that if let me just make sure i have my numbers right i'm pretty sure that that sale didn't quite get yeah okay so dennis rodman obviously has a pmg green ten copies and he also has a credentials now from the same season of ninety seven ninety eight and the credentials now for him is number to five and there was a lot of discussion last week on instagram stories and such about how kobe's credentials now which is eight copies went for a fraction of his pmg green in a private sale so the pmg green private sale was like three point low three something million and his credentials now out of eight sold at open auction for around six hundred six hundred and fifty thousand granted with the caveat that the that particular urine color right yes the urine colored credentials now which like i'm always like cautious about something like because like dude somebody just bought that car that's their grail and we are yucking their yum but but but it's it matters to the conversation here overall and anyway though we we look here and and now we have a different outcome which is where the rodman credentials granted five copies only sold for three hundred and sixty thousand at open auction with fanatics in march and now here we have a pmg green signed for three hundred and forty eight in may also on fanatics premier so there's a counterpoint to enter in the into the discussion about the credentials now versus the pmg green with the backdrop being how much does rarity matter and especially in these early nineties releases obviously i'm very much on the side of rarity matters a ton but not everybody is there's plenty of people who think that sort of the iconic nature of a set can trump rarity that's a completely valid point of view too there is no wrong answer on this there's just taste and preference the only other thing i wanna add is the context of the private sale is very helpful so like aaron judge had some monster private sales over the last few months five point two million for his bowman super auto first and then like almost two million i think for a dynasty logo man autograph one of one and then he had come to auction the non autograph version of his bowman super first bowman chrome and it sold for you know a seventh or an eighth of what i think it i think it sold it ended up selling for around eight hundred thousand and the autograph one for five point two so i think we've got a couple examples here where the private sale market is just i i think i think it's reasonable to conclude is is stronger than what these cards will do at open auction so but that that on a certain level makes sense you need to you know if somebody doesn't want if somebody isn't voluntarily sending their card into auction and a buyer wants to pry it out of a collection they need to pay stronger they need to pay more than probably what that card would bring in open market but that's that's a side commentary too is the private versus public i love the private versus public chat and it's good to recognize that i before we move off this topic i wanted to ask the question of you know we get the data from cardladder we get the here's the sales here's what these cards are valued or what people will pay for them and so we get so infatuated especially with the data and with comps when we're buying cards in this moment where we might not ever see these people who bought the top twenty cards who these people are if they showed them off it could just be very private tends to happen with a lot of these higher end sales what like outside of card ladder data like what do you maybe as collectors look at in terms of trying to get a pulse on like what is actually happening in the market like is there anything maybe josh from you like when you're trying to just assess outside of the data and the sales like that you look at like on the periphery about like to give you sort of indication and signals on like okay i i should have confidence to buy this lebron car right now or you know what now is probably not a good time because x like is there anything just from your experience that you can call out i can only go off of my own experience here and i have two things to mention one is my own like inner circles on instagram chats of groups that i'm in or you know sim people that are buying similar cards to what i'm buying if like a bunch of us have sort of raised the floor of what we're willing to spend either from each other or pulling from outside sources whether we all agree to that simultaneously or not or one of us wants to take the lead and hey i'm willing to pay more i usually kind of you know keep my finger on the pulse of that specific thing i'm sure a lot of people do that but specifically like right now with the football stuff i know what i was paying a year ago and i know a few of us are willing to pay a bit more depending on the player depending on this like whether it's a black finite or it's like a gold vinyl you know some of these change in at different ratios over time but like i'm i'm sort of very aware of that specific example the second one is it happens once a year and it's the national when i go to the national i'm very aware of like what's the overall sort of sentiment about stuff being overpriced do they feel comfortable paying x amount what types of players are overpriced in the moment and i just sort of like take that and you know each year brings its own sort of vibe where you know and post covid the first show is just sort like excitement to be back everyone was like spending big money they they were just excited to be back then it's like okay specific players are are heating up and then like specific categories like pokemon are heating up so this year i'm gonna be really focused on what are people talking about what are the crowds like what's the psa line like you know things like that so those are the two that i'm always focused on as opposed to just trying to keep up with every sale and sales history chris anything from you before we move off of this no man those are two great points and i always sort of have a hunch that like if i can too easily figure out what the stuff i'm collecting is worth it it it starts to lose appeal immediately like i like i like some of the mystery and like the stuff i've been focused on over the last year or two very my microphone just disconnected for a second sorry very do i still sound like i'm coming through clearly you're good yeah okay yeah so over you know i've i'm i've focused on things that are almost impossible to price so i just haven't really been in the in the mindset of like trying to take a pulse of the market for things that just you know really don't show up next topic i wanna move into is the psychology of category repricing i did an episode on this this week because i and i know this is a topic that you both have talked about and thought about for a long time as you've done content but coming off the heels of the wrestlemania patch autograph randy orton sale which was shared on the stacking slabs network congratulations to ryan of rbi crew seven for picking that up cool story if you're haven't heard check it out on book to last podcast but when that sale happened i was just like oh again another like new concept brought to you by fanatics and tops and ryan massive orton fan and collector he's got the best collection that i know of and i was like p there were watch parties of wrestling fans everyone was invested everyone was excited to see because it was on ebay it was very public and so the say the sale happens you know north of forty thousand which is a huge deal for modern wrestling cards this is a you just did the the the category is slowly elevated in price people are willing to spend more there's new participants but that was on the the larger side second highest wwe sale for ultra modern and so i was pumped for ryan but then i was pumped to see okay what are all the people i follow who collect this stuff like what is their response gonna be and i started to notice something that i noticed in other categories but i've never seen this prior to this in wrestling cards people started to share their randy orton cards hey check out my randy orton cards go go randy orton go wrestling all this and it just i found it so interesting that i was like i'm gonna take a step back and and think about this topic and try to put some things together regarding it because i find it so fascinating so like what i wanna dig into is just like the psychology behind these bigger sales and the response and what it means for collectors in that category like i wanna dig into like what actually happens from a psychological perspective after a monster sale and we can this can be in relation to this big premier auction we just saw and maybe in the last less than twenty four hours what you've seen or just in the history what you've seen and just wanna dig into that because i find it very very fascinating on just how some individuals in this space respond so josh maybe you start us off just regarding kind of this mental game gymnastics and category repricing that we go through as collectors i was really hoping you pick chris first this is such a hard question because it's like you know you see the big sale that gets an espn article comes up or you know like everyone starts posting their cards and then it sort of like fizzles out and i don't think we'll hear about randy orton sales for for a what you know maybe ever we're not we we probably won't hear about it so it's like it's probably just a temporary excitement people post their cards i don't know that it actually is gonna cause all randy orton cards to double tomorrow i think it's just more of like people are hoping that will happen but i'm really bad at answering these like long tail psychological questions this is more of a chris thing chris what what do you have yeah i think a big sale like that gives permission but it doesn't guarantee action so it it opens up a new window but it doesn't guarantee that a breeze will flow through and i think there's something to the fact that too much transparency and too many details can start to make it feel like a unicorn event so as much as we all love and celebrate the winner being named and by the way massive congratulations i do listen to the show that he does with adam i i it's just a great story it's just a great hobby success story but it's like there's so much detail surrounding that sale like we know that townes was the runner-up we know that he was the winner and i think the onlooker when they have access to that much transparency into what happened starts to think well is this ever gonna happen again like is karl anthony towns ever gonna be bidding on this and is ryan ever going to want to be the winner and like you have to have all these different things lined up properly to work and and quite frankly that's as as as much as that is a fair observation like the next time one comes to sale might be a whole different group of people bidding you know it's just but i think that's one of the the that's that's a general life principle is that like the more we figure out exactly how a process unfolded the more we sort of can scrutinize and analyze it and sort of start forming our rebuttals to it and that's the trade off of transparency now i'm a huge fan of transparency i i think transparency and reproducibility these are these are like foundational principles that like how whatever the consequences of people if if transparency actually increases skepticism i'm the guy who says good i i think skepticism is a hurdle that must be cleared and that and that skepticism is a good thing but i i think that's a consequence of it now the other thing that comes along because i think you've covered this topic very nicely in some of the sacking slabs this week brett another thing that comes along is controversy so like let no headline worthy sale pass without at least a handful of commenters in every social media forum noting that it's money laundering or that it's some sort of other nefarious activity and in fairness to them i'm sure sometimes it is or it's something something bad is afoot we've seen plenty plenty of examples of that too but the controversy if one has the stomach to withstand it the controversy is definitely something that breathes extra a few extra breaths of life into a headline and i have as as i was thinking about i have this like little story that like i think crystallizes this nicely from something that's not cards at all the mona lisa painting was painted by leonardo da vinci in the early fifteen hundreds and after his passing it transferred to the french court and then after the french revolution it transferred to the french government and it has been in the louvre in the early nineteen hundreds an an italian guy thought that france illicitly possessed this painting and at the time the painting was well known among like art critics and art circles but it certainly was not known to the lay person the average household across the world had no idea what the mona lisa was that that should be very clear here people had no clue what that was but the painting was stolen there was an empty space in the museum where it sat for two years and the intrigue of the theft and the controversy surrounding why would somebody steal this and then sort of the international antagonism of the belief you know that well was it taken from france because you know whatever just speculations run wild and it was the fact that it was stolen it was the fact that the theft itself not anything about the painting but it was the theft that made it a headline that made it global news and it it it attracted crowds people would go to the museum and just stare at the blank space on the wall like that was an attraction suddenly that this stolen painting why was it stolen eventually after two years the owner was caught trying to fence it and it was reacquired and put back but now it became the most famous painting in the world and it probably still is to this day and the thing that made it famous the thing that made it iconic the thing that multiplied its value infinitely was the controversy surrounding it was the fact that it was the object of a theft and so on and so forth i think there are parallels there to controversial card sales and transactions that happen in sports card hobby controversy can elevate the the visibility of cards and and and peace of art and other things to to such an extent that they take on the property of being iconic not because of any intrinsic property of the item itself but because of the controversy that surrounds chris bringing in mona lisa and leonardo da vinci i think you've given the bad actors who are listening a a really twisted idea on how to increase the value of their cards yeah well the mechanism is there and it's not pretty you know it's not but like i was saying transparency into how these things potentially work is helpful and i think it can help sort of the onlooker sort of deconstruct how certain things elevate in status and then they can make up their own mind if they want to continue to reward that or not we're we're going to push the show topic out for next time because it'll still be relevant probably even more relevant and i wanna ask before we get get to pickups i just wanna ask one follow-up question here because i'm interested because as we're talking about this this has got me thinking about just reporting in cardladder and there is the sentiment often when a private deal happens or somebody sells something off platform there is a contingent of people that say can you report your sale in cardladder can you get it in there and then sometimes the the new owner says okay yeah let's put it in there and sometimes they just like no why would i do that so we're talking about transparency and there's i don't like there's no right answer to this and i i would say there are situations for me when i buy cards that yeah some sometimes i'll like try to get it reported and sometimes i'll just be like i don't i'm i don't care i'm not interested in getting it reported and i don't really know why like from my end i'm one way or the other but i would love to like get your all perspective on just like how you think about that topic because i'm sure like you're inundated constantly with like private sales stuff and it's probably a topic you deal with a lot so maybe josh we'll start with you on this like do you have any thoughts or opinions just regarding just like the private sale if it or if the private sale gets reported or not in cardladder like how do you think about that well chris handles the private sales and he'll have way more information about this than me and so similar to the psychology question you got you teed up two in a row there ask me about ask me about coding and developing within the sports car hobby and i'll i'll or lebron and i'll just keep going but on the private sales it's usually a matter of like if the person feels like they got a steal on it they don't wanna report it and then they feel like they paid fairly they do wanna report it because they wanna establish the floor and the value that that's like the one i think i've that's that's that's a good call out chris what about you yeah exactly and it's it's always i think better on balance to get a significant private sale reported like the need for a private sale reporting really isn't present if there's a lot of other data available to price something but if it's a truly singular unique item that sells very very rarely and a private sale can help shed some light into what has happened transacting for this card then i think it it the transparency there does a service to people who who are trying to find figure out what's going on in the market but there's there there's a big transparency requirements in order to get a private sale in so the standard is that every party to the transaction must be named and must consent to being named and not only are they named but they must have a a public facing social media that they can be contacted through in case anybody who's looking at that sale would like to follow-up so for example if a new private sale comes in and it's got you know like a like the tom brady super factor private sale that was recently reported it had a buyer it had a seller and it had a broker all three of those people are named all three of their collecting accounts in instagram are provided and though that's that level of transparency sometimes is a bit of a turn off to people it certainly means that and i would assume for all intents and purposes that any potential agencies that are looking at the space are going to be taking notes of what things are being purchased for and sold for and they're gonna be taking note of who the buyers and the sellers are so there's there's a lot of like when when one does make one's private sale public there's a lot of light that gets shined on it the participants the price the we also make notes we don't reveal the documents but we make note of what documents were used to prove the transaction and all that information permanently stays in the public record so there's a lot of light shine there's more transparency into a private sale than there is into any particular public auction or result so there's there what what like there's a there there's a lot of privacy sacrificed by making that sale public that you know provides quite a bit of it it provides quite a quite a deep look into the mechanics of how that sale happened so and and and that's a there should be a high bar to to publish a private sale it should it should go hand in hand with inviting scrutiny with inviting skepticism with inviting further investigation and also you know it it hopefully sheds light on what on a particular market transact that happened at a particular time good look at just how cardladder handles private sales before we get out of here always like to in the conversation talking about cards do either of you have any cards in your collection whether new or old that you'd like to share and talk about why you bought it yeah i have one pickup ready to go i showed this on crossover but i haven't shown it on the stacking slabs network so this is the twenty fourteen top scrum super factor demarco murray and this was his offensive player of the year year in twenty fourteen where he led the league in rushing so i i tried to buy that one at national pretty aggressively and the seller wouldn't sell but so he reached out to me and we've got a deal done pretty quick it's if at first you don't succeed you know they're always we're always moving stuff around so if the timing's not right it's i always take the mental notes as the holder owner of the card you get the leads in your head and when you need the cash you just reach out and hoping that somebody's ready to go cool card i am becoming reinfatuated by the super factors out of chrome probably because tops chrome is telling me that i should be but very cool card chris what do you got yeah so sort of a follow along to or a follow-up to the cards that i called out in the fanatics premier that are of interest to me i've i've taken a great interest in the first one of ones and the early one of ones for michael jordan and i'm sort of expanding that scope now to take that same approach to football too and so what i have here and shout out to pat nicholson i can't i i wish i could be a fly on the wall when i see his face when i show this this is the two thousand ultra masterpiece one of one priest holmes plus one of his very first one of ones a fantasy goat and i've i have to credit pac for like continuously modestly placing priest holmes on my radar and the hobby's radar as a fantasy goat mhmm and sort of it was a convergence of a lot of different factors of like all of a sudden i started thinking about early nineties one of ones and when i start looking at what's available i see a a cool priest homes card i think about and i already have in plans in my mind like three first teams one of the great fantasy runs etcetera it was quite a natural fit so there you have it oh that's so good cool card was not expecting that also whenever i think of priest homes because pac talks about them all the time i just like think about being in a grocery store which i get all my groceries delivered i don't step foot in the grocery store these days i don't have time too many kids but when i think about priest homes i just think about like the the smell of a grocery store and looking over in the magazine rack and seeing the fantasy guides and just seeing priest priest homes on the front so can escape stuff like that really cool card both of you guys card ladder confidential twenty is in the can appreciate everyone out there for supporting see you again next month